I have known the saying "take what you need" for years. However, only recently I noticed that it can be interpreted in more than one way. Since you usually prefer what you've known for a while, I'll start with the meaning first, like...
Since the amount of philosophers our planet has produced is almost endless, it is hard to generalize whether the average philosopher was smarter than the average non-philosopher. Many of the philosophers who have ever lived have never been heard of. Since only those with truly groundbreaking ideas, were widely published, we take...
With some philosophical statements, one can easily get the impression that the author was or is definitely crazy. But what exactly is there to this assumption? In short, there were crazy philosophers, but most are not. Often the impression arises, by the fact that the philosophical statements are formulated on the one hand complex and on the other hand abstract...
Many philosophers have grappled with the question of who or what we actually are as human beings. By this, very few mean whether we are hairless descendants of apes or the creation of a god, but what makes us human. Alan Watts has presented his views in various lectures. This article is about how...
In a letter to a friend, Seneca wrote that death is not an event somewhere in the future. Rather, one should see death in the now, in the permanent progression of time. One could also say that every moment that passes dies in that very moment. "The last hour in which we cease to exist brings....
Don't take life too seriously. Most people have probably heard this phrase. It is extremely widespread and even the philosopher Alan Watts had used it. But what exactly did he mean by it? Alan Watts tried to mediate between Eastern and Western philosophy and therefore it is not surprising that his approach to "the...
Often when we are faced with a task that we are afraid of, or that seems unsolvable, we chicken out. The problem, however, is that we can't outgrow ourselves unless we set ourselves tasks that exceed our current competencies. As mentioned in my post, "A Journey of a Thousand Miles..."...
I encourage all of us, regardless of our beliefs, to question the basic narratives of our world, to connect past developments to current problems, and not to be afraid of controversial issues. ' Dr. Yuval Noah Harari Dr. Yuval Noah Harari is a professor of history, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The quote that appears in this post...
Albert Camus was one of the most famous philosophers of existentialism. Existentialism is a philosophical current that found many followers in the middle of the 20th century. In existentialism, the existence of man is the central point. Above all, the existence of man, marked by suffering, which only gains meaning through one's own actions. "To live is to act"...
Alan Watts was known not only for making Far Eastern worldviews accessible to the Western world, but also for criticizing various circumstances of our modern society. This short but powerful excerpt from one of his speeches does both. Alan Watts explains the interdependence in which opposites stand, since they cannot exist without each other. In the...
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